Guest Viewpoint: Ballots cast on machine require scrutiny

By Kat L'Estrange  Eugene Register-Guard   23 May 2005

 Voters typically believe the people have the power to vote unpopular leaders out of office. The reality, as was discovered in 2004, is that dirty tricks and schemes designed to disenfranchise voters make free and fair elections impossible today.

With the proliferation of electronic voting machines, plus partisan secretaries of state, state and county elections officials are having difficulty conducting fair elections in which legally registered citizens get to vote, and to have their votes counted.

Proof comes from yet another bipartisan election commission that convened in late April in Washington, D.C., this time to examine what went wrong in the 2004 election. Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker led the commission. Both claim the nation's leading political parties want the same thing, which Baker describes as "the widest possible access, consistent with voter integrity."

Recommendations of a 2001 commission led to the Help America Vote Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002. As a result of this law, federal funds for updating voting systems now mainly go to Republican-owned electronic voting companies - Diebold, ES&S and others - that have proprietary rules to allow them to conduct business free from public scrutiny.

In 2004, 80 percent of the nation's votes were counted electronically. Thirty percent of votes were cast on machines that use no paper ballots, making recounts impossible. These numbers will increase dramatically by 2006.

Something went wrong in the 2004 election, and one needn't look further than Ohio to figure out what. As in Florida in 2000, a Bush victory was assured by a secretary of state who served as state co-chairman for the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign: J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Blackwell took an oath to protect the sanctity of the vote, as did Katherine Harris in Florida. Both failed miserably.

The Texas Strike Force descended on Ohio a few days prior to the election. On Election Day, GOP challengers in mainly urban precincts set out to challenge voters, a practice considered legal under Ohio law.

The action was justified by claims that illegally registered Democrats and felons were voting, and that Democrats were throwing out the military's absentee ballots. If those charges were true, wouldn't it have made more sense to hold those engaging in such acts accountable rather than denying tens of thousands of others the right to vote? Unfortunately, common sense was sacrificed by the GOP's determination to not let this Bush be a one-timer.

Election day in Ohio proved disastrous for urban, mainly minority, voters. Reports of widespread disenfranchisement led Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik to request a recount in all of Ohio's 88 counties.

However, because the recount lacked the support of the two major political parties, it was doomed from the start. Lawsuits to prevent Blackwell from certifying the election until after the recount failed.

The Ohio recount ultimately was based on a recertification of original vote totals from electronic voting computers and central tabulators in precincts handpicked by Blackwell - rather than precincts chosen at random, as required by law. Blackwell refused to further examine the votes that could not be counted by machines, the so-called undervotes and overvotes. Of all the problems identified, none appeared to fall in favor of John Kerry.

Bush supposedly won the popular vote by more than 3 million nationwide, while Kerry had a 51 percent to 48 percent margin in exit polls. Similar discrepancies in Ukraine led to a revote, supported by Bush, and a different outcome there last December.

Industry-supported election "reforms" continue to move the public out of the voting process. Apparently, new voting equipment will be on back order for the 2006 election. It isn't difficult to recognize the potential problems with centralizing voter registration lists; millions will be disenfranchised nationwide.

Because of continued uncertainty, the public must demand a moratorium of all voting and vote counting by electronic voting machines until the system can be regulated. Secretaries of state should be banned from leading political campaigns. Hand-counted audits should be established to ensure that votes are being counted accurately, with control returned to local officials beholden to their communities' voters.

Our votes are far too valuable. Control over the election system must not be handed to private companies with no allegiance to the people, only to profit and politics.